Fact-Checking Elizabeth Bishop

Abstract

This chapter looks at historical and factual mistakes in Elizabeth Bishop's poetry. Elizabeth Bishop was a writer dedicated to a sense of accuracy; her poem “In the Waiting Room” bears the markers of a specific place and time—“Worcester, Massachusetts” and “the fifth / of February, 1918.” Descriptive specificity is one of her specialties, and this poem, which refers to real stories in that month's National Geographic magazine, gives the impression of combining specificity with objective truth. And yet its facts are muddled: much of the material in the poem actually comes from a different issue of the magazine. Does Bishop's inaccuracy matter given her own adherence to the facts, or is it possible for descriptive poetry to offer its own aesthetic narrative? Focusing on her use and misuse of historical detail in this and other autobiographical poems, the chapter highlights what Bishop's readers have to gain by separating her poetry's fictionalized facts from its literal and empirical truths.